MyScraper is a screen-based experience designed for the Skyscraper Museum in Downtown Manhattan. MyScraper Application targets the children visitors and their families by aiming to create a basic understanding of design parameters of skyscrapers. The application evaluates the participant’s design process step by step according to their decisions on adding different architectural design elements.

Our team visited the Skyscraper Museum in Downtown Manhattan and their website to analyze and document the existing user experience provided by the museum. The content at the website was very great in amount, however, it had some navigational problems. Additionally, this rich content was not visible enough to the audiences at the museum space as well. On the other hand, the museum space was not providing any digital and interactive experience to the visitors. After our research and observations, we decided to develop an interactive experience for the museum which can help visitors to engage with the idea of Skyscraper better while offering a new aesthetic branding to the museum. We decided to locate this experience at the center of the space to create an impactful first impression which might contribute not only to user experience, also to the brand identity of the museum.

Design Goals

The main goal of the project was to create an experience for visitors that helps them to understand design process of a skyscraper in Manhattan. The physical scaled-models of the skyscrapers at the museum have already attracting children's attention. Accordingly, we decided to choose children and their parents as our target audiences. By considering the architectural parameters that are important to the design process of a skyscraper, we developed the flow of the digital user experience. Participant;

1 | Chooses one of the areas they want to build.2 | Learns about the context (pop-up information: the history of the neighborhood or other buildings)3 | Decides the number of floors with help of an abstract structure.4 | Decides where to locate vertical circulation elements like elevators and stairs. 5 | Picks the materials for surfaces for facades.6 | Adds more elements on the building like solar panels, trees, vertical garden etc.

Storyboard

1 | Visitors' journey begins

2| Spatial experience at the main hall

3| Digital Interaction: Design own Skyscraper

4| Display shows each participants’ designs

5| Participants can order a 3D printed model of their designs

6| Orders are sent to the participants

Digital User Experience

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Mock-Ups

Evaluation

This project was a good team-work practice for designing a real-world institution by considering their existing brand identity and experience. Our solution was able to enrich the physical experience of museum space with a digital product. On the other hand, we had three (3)-weeks for the entire process of making which included research, concept development, creating personas, user flows and wireframes, and producing the final digital prototype. While we were targeting children and their families, the visual language of our design could not be developed enough to fulfill the needs of our target users because of the constraints of the process.